This service is intended for technology companies that own a platform or middleware solution that third-party developers use to design for end-users. 

Method

We typically perform user tests of around ten to twenty diverse designs that have been implemented on your platform: this gives us a large number of individual examples of user interface patterns that work well and design approaches that should be avoided.

Based on these individual findings, we use our extensive experience in guidelines development to generalize the usability issues into powerful design principles that are written down and documented in the final guidelines document together with supporting examples and screenshots.

Who Should Purchase?

These designs are typically miserable, particularly in the enterprise software space. No matter how good your technology is, the user interface is at the mercy of VARs, installation consultants, and other developers who usually have little knowledge of usability. And their designs show it. Give your developers a good set of usability guidelines and the quality of their work will improve.

If you have developed a new technology, such as a hand-held computer, an alternative operating system, or a programming language, you are really shipping a platform that developers will use to develop new applications and solutions for their customers.The total user experience is 10% your work and 90% what others put on top of it. If your platform is revolutionary, nobody will know how to design for it, and the products will have horrible usability. Finding out what works and what doesn't work for users is one of the best ways to help your developers succeed in the market.

The ultimate reason to have usability guidelines is to improve the quality of the designs made with your platform: this will sell more of these designs and thus expand your platform. A second benefit comes from being able to tell your customers that the world's leading usability experts have developed the usability guidelines for your platform. This proves your commitment to quality and reduces customers' concerns about total cost of ownership, much of which is usually caused by bad usability.

Schedule

The platform owner will be responsible for getting us access to a broad spectrum of designs that have already been implemented using the platform. We prefer to test between 10 and 20 designs. Note that there needs to be several sample designs in existence before we can conduct the empirical research that forms the foundation for the guidelines development.

Qualifications

Nielsen Norman Group is the world's leading research organization for the discovery and publication of user interface guidelines. We have documented thousands of usability guidelines, ranging from 113 guidelines for homepage design over 46 guidelines for designing for senior citizens to 111 guidelines for intranet design.

Members of our team conducted much of the original research in the 1980s and 1990s on making user interface standards and guidelines easier to apply for designers and developers (some of which was published in our 1989 book, Coordinating User Interfaces for Consistency). Even earlier, a member of our team wrote Apple Computer's first human interface guidelines.

Deliverables

Additional deliverables can include the creation of a full-day course to teach your developers how to follow the guidelines and deliver high-quality user experiences to their customers. We can present this ourselves or we can teach your staff how to teach it (this "train the trainer" approach is usually the most cost-effective solution if a large number of developers need to be taught the guidelines).

We can also evangelize your developers through keynote presentations at your developer conference or individual visits to key developers where we can give them specific feedback on the mistakes in their own designs.

How to Order

Please contact Nielsen Norman Group at info@nngroup if you would like more information or are interested in this service.